Humberto Tan ends up in a huge scandal without being asked. He has given Gerard Spong a big platform to defend Khalid Kasem, but what exactly is his importance? “Rectify!”
Khalid Kasem’s mask has fallen off: the man who made television for years in the eve of the country’s largest TV channel NPO 1 appears to have acted very dubiously during his time as a lawyer. And according to the AD, he lied about his contact with the dangerous top criminal Ridouan Taghi. What kind of person is this?
Glass of water
After the newspaper’s controversial second article about Khalid and his dubious contacts, all kinds of toga types appeared on talk shows in the evenings to clear his alley. One of these is Gerard Spong, one of the most famous lawyers in our country. “Well, yes, it’s a storm in a teacup, nothing more,” he said of that article.
Spong was really downplaying the AD’s research work. “There is nothing in it that you can say that Khalid has acted criminally or disciplinaryally reprehensible. Look, he didn’t want to reveal exactly who he had contact with… Yes, that can happen, but that is not reprehensible, that is not culpable.”
Two sources
Lars Duursma, one of the best-known communications experts in our country, has heard from reliable sources that Spong is currently Khalid’s lawyer. “But he didn’t say that on TV and I would find that really special and also incredibly bad,” he says in the podcast The Communicados.
In such a case, the viewer must of course know that Spong is sitting at the table wearing a double hat. Where Lars still talks about two sources in his podcast, he adds X that ‘there are now more’. What does the criminal lawyer himself say? “I cannot comment on who is or is not my client in this.”
Spong responds
When Spong is asked whether he thinks it should be clear to the viewer of a talk show ‘when a lawyer speaks about a client who is currently assisting him’, he answers: “The capacity of the speaker is separate from the content of what is said he says.”
Lars’ co-host Victor Vlam: “Hm, that last bit gives it away a bit, because he actually says: ‘I’m not saying that it is so, but if it is so, it is not a problem.’”
“As if he couldn’t resist defending himself,” said Lars.
Rectify
The editors of Humberto say that they know nothing about this, but Lars now has several sources and believes that the talk show host should open his broadcast with this tonight. “He has something to correct at the start of the broadcast. Journalistic credibility is at stake,” he writes on X.
Victor: “Yes, I agree with you. I think they should rectify this if this is indeed the case. This is something that is really not nice and really reflects negatively on Humberto’s credibility, so I hope they will work on this.”